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book's British price of sixteen shillings may mean about 1/8 of a com–
parable salary. It may be hard for us to understand all this talk about
a decline of standards, or to feel that it justifies despair, for we may
assume a height for European standards that would make any decline
seem microscopic. And, then, in the period covered by these "Com–
ments," there has been nothing like a decline here: what else can the
success, say, of the Readers' Subscription book club mean if not the
refinement
of standards, in the same sense that the first Neiman-Marcus
store represented a refinement in Texas. When Mr. Connolly notes the
decline of standards, or of talent or of work, when his contributors
comment on the high costs of the literary life, when the editor can find
no worthy contributions eX'cept American ones, when magazines close
down-all the gloomy observations and the desperate need to make them
have reference to real facts, a real situation. Do
we
then have the right
to say despair is excessive?
But, if we don't have the right, as I think we don't, we can only
be
inconclusive about the emotions of this book and the response it
may produce. Mr. Connolly says that "Baedeker is still the antidote to
Baudelaire," and we may feel his remedy is not the right one; but
then if we lived on a small island twenty-odd miles from a great
continent, we might feel differently. And consider how we take the
blank, stark or primitive "country" as an antidote to the city. The very
conscious mention of Baudelaire may, of course, make us wonder whether
despair did not become habitual, or automatic; it is, however, Mr.
Connolly's habit to name things in this way. The travel pieces are
lively but then the travels were made in France and Switzerland and
America; when this humanist returned to England he found it dirty,
stupid, bureaucratic, narrow-minded. He wrote about London as if
Horizon's
offices were in Stepney instead of in Bedford Square, as if
it were the dark satanic mills of the Midlands and the State were Satan.
And then while we in America discover our own innocence or world–
liness, or the genius in our politics or our relation to Europe, or the
complexities of our culture, there is likely to be a great mistake about
Mr. Connolly's anthology of melancholy; his spirit may even be taken
for alienation, which it is not, and then all the rest of his feeling would
be missed, the part that gives his tone its poise.
It would be improper for us to suggest alternative antidotes to
Baudelaire; we don't know him so well that our qualifications would
be accepted, and, then, it might be especially indelicate for Americans
to do so. In fact, the book would conform to type-and be easier for
some Americans to read-if there were a strong current of anti-Ameri-
